Tech World (Undying Mercenaries Series) (42 page)

My mouth opened a tiny fraction, but I clamped it shut again. Under no circumstances was I going to screw this up.

She looked at me, and I looked back at her with a blank poker face. I honestly didn’t know what else to do.

She looked down again, and I was off the hook. “I’ve been studying these cases—ones like yours, I mean. I’ve read up on them. Sexual predators come in all shapes and sizes, James. I know that now. I didn’t understand before.”

I wanted to say something. I wanted to choke or even laugh out loud. But I didn’t, and I was proud of my self-control.

“Turov was your superior. You were taken advantage of. That’s how I understand it, and I want you to accept my apology for getting angry with you about sleeping with her.”

“Okay…” I said. I felt I had to say something.

She gave me a little kiss then grabbed me by the chin. “But don’t go back to her. Not if you want to ever be with me again. I hate that woman. She’s a monster. Do you understand me?”

I nodded. “Yeah…look, Natasha…”

“What?”

What was I going to say next? That I’d been as guilty of any transgressions as Turov had? That blaming it all on the officer was bullshit in my book?

I couldn’t do it. Instead I hugged her, and I poured her a glass of wine. It was perfectly chilled, due to the precision-engineering of my new alien-made fridge. The old one had never recovered after taking a bullet months ago.

Sitting with Natasha again, I handed her the wine and we chatted about light things for a time. Finally, the subject of the squids came up. The topic never seemed to be far from anyone’s mind these days.

“Do you think they’ll come
here
, James?” she asked me almost in a whisper. “They might, you know. They know what we did.”

“Are you sure? We blew their ship up in a single salvo.”

She shook her head. “I’m a tech, remember? We went over all the radio signals while we were stabilizing the megahab. They got off a packet of data with a powerful transmitter. They sent it on a tight beam toward the rim of the Galaxy. Somewhere out past the edge of the frontier.”

I frowned. “You think it was an SOS?”

“What else could it have been?”

“Hegemony knows about that, right?”

She pursed her lips at me. “Of course.”

“I’m just asking because I haven’t heard anything on the net.”

“They’re not talking about it on the online reports, naturally. There’s no benefit to causing a panic.”

A panic.
The words rang in my mind. Natasha was right—if the people of Earth knew the real score—that unknown worlds full of Cephalopods were out there and enraged with us… If they knew that Battle Fleet 921 was gone and not scheduled to return... Yes, they’d panic all right.

“Did we do the right thing, James?” Natasha asked me in a small voice.

I looked down at her. I could tell she was freaking out. It was true we’d taken it upon ourselves to blast the squids. Sure, Turov was taking the credit and was now doing a talk-show circuit—her new looks were helping her there. But it had been Natasha, Carlos and I who’d pulled the trigger on this new war.

“Absolutely,” I said, putting my arm around her and pulling her close. “We didn’t have any choice, really. They were bullying Earth, and we punched them in the face. They’ll think twice before they come after us again.”

Natasha seemed happier, but I wasn’t sure she bought my bullshit. Hell, I didn’t even buy all of it.

We sipped our wine until the bottle was empty and fell asleep
together on my couch. Alien air pumps wheezed and thrummed softly. Somehow, it was a comforting sound.

The End

From the Author:
Thanks Reader! I hope you enjoyed
TECH WORLD,
the third book in the Undying Mercenaries Series. If you liked the book and want to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review to support it. Let me know what kind of world you’d like McGill to discover next.

-BVL

BONUS Reading!

What follows is the beginning of the Star Force Series, Book #1:
SWARM

To purchase the entirety of the book follow the link or search for
SWARM
on your eBook Seller's website, or go to BVLarson.com

SWARM

(Star Force Series #1)

by

B. V. Larson

-1-

The night before the invasion, the whole sky looked
wrong
somehow. It was the color of it, I think. The sky was purple, rather than blue or black. It was as if the sun never completely went down that night, but instead turned a dark umber and lurked beneath the bottom rim of the world, lighting up the heavens ever so slightly. Only a few shreds of cloud moved along the horizon, over the Sierra Nevadas to the east. Each strip of cloud was tinged a deep red, the color of wet rust or dried blood.

Other than the strangely hued sky, it felt like a typical Central California night in late spring. It wasn’t stormy, but a cool breeze came down from the foothills as the evening deepened. In the fields around my farmhouse, a thousand stalks of ripe corn rippled.

Jake, my oldest, performed his usual shrug when I asked him if he had completed his list of chores. His short, black hair was as shiny as a crow’s feathers. His eyes were blue and piercing. He looked so much like me his sister sometimes called him my evil twin.

When I took my son out to the stable to
prove
he hadn’t shoveled the stalls, the horses were uneasy, shuffling about and sidestepping. They showed the whites of each big eyeball and tossed their heads, but didn’t shy when I reached up to stroke them. Frowning, I joined Jake and we finished the shoveling. He looked at me, surprised to get help with a chore he loathed. I pretended nothing was wrong. Truthfully, I didn’t want to leave him alone out there.

Afterward, we came out of the stable to find the moon was rising. The fields were rustling and the smell of ripe corn and fresh-cut alfalfa hung thickly in the air. I kept looking over my shoulder, up at that strange sky. We’d bought this place, my wife Donna and I, as part of a back-to-the-country dream. My colleagues called me the “gentleman farmer” and theorized I must be commuting through cow herds each morning to the university. I loved it out here and even after Donna died I refused to move back to the city. But in all my years out here, I’d never seen a sky like this one.

Jake ignored everything that was wrong with the night and headed upstairs. He would spend the evening surfing the web, twiddling with his headphones and pretending to do homework. My second child, Kristine, knew the moment she saw me that something was different tonight. She’d always been more intuitive.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” she asked, looking up from her algebra paper. She was thirteen, and this year her body had a new shape I found upsetting. She looked like her mother—except she was skinny and wore braces. To me, she was perfect.

I shook my head as I tapped her algebra book. “Nothing, Kris. Don’t get distracted.”

Kristine went back to her homework, and I went back to gazing out at the strange purple sky. Nothing changed, so I headed for the computer in my study. I had a lot of grading to do, but fortunately most of that was online. I logged into the university website for the last time and began answering emails and grading lab projects.

Teaching online wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Computer science students asked hard questions of their professors and typing in comments was often more work than simply discussing things in person. Sometimes I missed the simplicity of a pen and paper. Even scribbling notes in the margins of printouts was better than typing everything. Red-penned circles and Xs were wonders of communication that we’d lost somehow, over the years.

Some hours later I chased the kids to bed and fell asleep myself. I dreamt of my wife Donna, who had died nearly a decade ago in a car accident. We’d hit a chain link fence and gone right through it. The steel posts had whipped around the car as the chain link wrapped us up like a net. One of the posts had come through the back window and impaled Donna.

She looked at me from the passenger seat. I saw her eyes in my sleep. Her lips moved, trying to tell me something, but her staring eyes were the eyes of the dead.

It was the eyes that woke me up. I sat up in bed, gasping.

I’ll always wonder what it was Donna had been trying to tell me. If I had stayed asleep one minute longer, could I have heard her voice? Maybe everything would have gone differently…if I had.

-2-

The second night—the bad night—started off good. Both my kids were in a fine mood. It was only Tuesday, but school was out next week for summer, and the excitement of the coming vacation had caught up with them. We went to bed late, after watching movies over the net
and eating popcorn. It was one benefit of growing up without a mom: there was no one around to tell Dad it was a school night.

The ship came to loom over my little farm sometime after midnight. It caught Jake first. I don’t know why—perhaps because his room was on the eastern side of the house. I heard later they had come from the east, following the darkness around the world in a wave.

I was asleep at the time of the ship’s arrival. The walls shook, and my TV fell off the top of the armoire. That’s probably what woke me up. The TV crashed and I threw myself out of bed, believing we were in an earthquake. I shouted for the kids, ordering them out of the house. This quake seemed like a bad one.

In movies, when they come for you, there are always lights in the sky beaming brightly into your windows. There were no bright lights at my house. In fact, the entire farm was bathed in deep shadow. This only made sense—I realized as I passed the window at the end of the hall in my tee-shirt and underwear—because there was a huge ship looming over us. It blotted out that strange, purple sky. I saw it hanging up there without a sound. It was maybe a hundred yards long and half as wide. It was completely dark, with no lights or visible engines. As black as pitch at the bottom of a well, my grandmother would have said. I paused and stared in amazement for several seconds.

I heard another crash, in Jake’s room. I ran down the hall, calling his name. There was no answer. When I reached his room, the bed was empty. His window had been smashed inward. Shards of glass and a torn out black screen lay on the floor. Jake hadn’t even screamed, as far as I could recall. Then I looked out the broken window and my brain froze over for a second or two.

Jake hadn’t been taken away by some kind of magic beam. Instead, a thick, cable-like, multi-segmented arm had reached down and plucked my boy out of his bed. It resembled the body of a two-foot thick snake—long, sleek,
and black. Was there someone up there in the ship working a joystick and collecting specimens? That was my first stunned impression. I got the feeling that to them, we were things that crawled under rocks at the bottom of the sea. They were the scientists who had come down to our world to poke about and disturb our tiny existence.

When I’d gotten over my shock enough to move, I ran outside. Kristine joined me on the porch. She stared up with me at the ship with the snake-like arm. Jake was in the grip of the hand. He still wasn’t screaming, but he was squirming, so it hadn’t killed him yet. As we watched, he disappeared with the arm up into the ship’s belly.

Kris’ mouth hung open, full of braces. Her eyes blinked in horror. “What do we do, Dad?”

“Get in the car,” I ordered.

“What about Jake?”

“I’ll get him,” I said. I had no idea how to perform such a miracle, but I was determined to try. I raced back into the house and snatched up my keys and my Remington 12-gauge with a box of shells. I was going to blow off that snake-arm, or at least blast away at the ship. What else could I do?

I ran back outside. The screen door had latched itself shut. I straight-armed it and the flimsy aluminum thing snapped off the frame with the sound of ripping wood. Kristine sat inside the car looking out the passenger window, terrified. I thought to myself, in a disconnected moment, that Jake would be angry when he found out she had taken the front seat. He was the oldest, and since time immemorial in our family, the oldest kid had always gotten to ride up front with Dad.

I loaded the Remington and trotted out into the gravel driveway, craning my neck to look up. Jake and the arm had vanished, but I kept loading. The ship hadn’t moved, so maybe they could be convinced to give Jake back. It was the only thing I could think of.

When I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw a darker spot open up on the bottom of the ship. It was then that Jake fell back down to earth, plummeting out of the ship. He landed in the horse trough…or rather half-in and half-out of it. That broke his spine, I think, but he was probably dead before they’d dropped him. I ran to him, making choking sounds. Kristine was screaming inside the car, her high-pitched cries muffled by the closed windows and doors.

There was my boy…dead, with his face looking up at me from underwater. The rest of him was bent at an impossible angle, limp and draped over the steel edge of the trough. There was blood everywhere. He had been gutted, then dropped.

I fired a shell at the ship. It probably wasn’t a smart thing to do, but I no longer cared. I left Jake and half-ran, half-staggered—still in shock—toward the car. It was time to run for it.

That’s when I saw the snake-arm clearly for the first time. It had slid silently down again while I had stared helplessly into my dead boy’s eyes. It punched through the passenger side window of my car and grabbed my daughter, who was struggling to escape. She had managed to get the driver’s door open. She crawled over the seats and tried to run, but the snake-arm had a loop around her mid-section. The arm dragged her backward.

I raised my shotgun and fired a second shell, at the snake-arm this time. I saw a tiny cluster of orange sparks, as if I’d hit metal. There was no other visible effect. I kept running to my daughter, but I didn’t make it.

Kristine held onto the steering wheel with grim determination, but that didn’t last more than a second. She was ripped screaming from the car, dragged through the broken window and hauled up into the ship.

I could see a darker spot up there, where she had disappeared. I circled under the ship, all around the farmhouse, raving. I thought about firing up at it, but feared I might hit Kristine somehow. I suppose I could have driven off in the car, or ran out into cornfield to escape, but I didn’t even think of these things.

It didn’t matter. Kristine’s body fell, flopping, out of an opening that yawned in ship’s dark belly. She crashed down onto the roof of the house. I could tell right away she was broken, but I climbed up there anyway. I got on top of the garbage cans, then onto the rickety fence which my wife Donna had told me to fix until the day she died, but I’d never gotten around to. From the fence, I managed to scramble up onto the shingles and run to where Kristine lay. My face was wet, either from tears or blood, I’m not sure. I’d been clawing at my own face by that time and it was difficult to see, so it could have been either.

Her eyes were open, and there was terror imprinted forever on her brow. I’ve never forgotten that look. The memory has hardened my mind like nothing else in my existence.

The snake-arm got me next. Coming up from behind, it plucked me off the peak of the roof. I no longer cared if the arm took me. In fact, my only thought was to hang onto my Remington, which I somehow managed. I had lost the box of shells, probably back when I found Jake.

I held my gun, and I held my fire. My only hope was that I would get the chance to blow a hole in something. Something softer than steel.

I was deposited in a quiet chamber. It wasn’t big, maybe the size of a bedroom—or an examination room. I wasn’t thinking too well at that point, so I just kept turning around, aiming my gun at the walls. I didn’t try to find a way out. Right then, I didn’t care about escape. I was no longer trying to run away. Everyone I cared about was dead, and all I wanted now was revenge. I wouldn’t say I was calm—far from it—but I was
cold
inside.

Looking back, my unusual behavior saved my life. Part of the wall opened, dissolving away to nothing. A being took a half-step forward.

This being was an alien. There had never been anything like it on Earth, at least not to my knowledge. It would have made an interesting subject for a documentary if we’d discovered it in some remote spot of the globe. The thing stood about four feet tall and had four hooves. But it had hands, too. Well, not
hands
, exactly. Three opposed digits would describe them better, each hand looking like a tripod of thumbs. It had blades too, natural ones that sprouted from its head like antlers. Imagine a deer with horned knives for antlers and a set of three-thumbed leathery hands. It reminded me of something from Greek mythology. What had they called them? Centaurs. Half-man, half-beast. But this centaur leaned in the direction of pure beast with freaky hands.

The eyes swept over me with some level of intelligence. I could only pray this was one of the things that ran the ship, because I wanted some revenge. It took a step forward, and maybe it had expected me to retreat, I don’t know. But I was not in a cooperative mood. There was red blood on those horn-blades. I suspected it was my kids’ blood.

It took a second purposeful step, lowering its horn-blades in my direction. That was as far as it got before I blasted it. I had no doubt now those blades were showing me my own kids’ blood. It was too fresh. The hard part was to
stop
blasting, even after the centaur went down. It managed to cut me once, being faster and tougher even than it looked. I didn’t care.

I stopped firing and heard something. I turned around quickly. There stood a second one. This one didn’t wait around. I fired as it charged, taking one of those freakish three-pronged hands off, then the shotgun clicked. The magazine was dry. The centaur-thing picked itself up and came at me again, and I met its head with the butt of my shotgun.

The fight went on for a while, and it became dirty at the end. I gouged at the eyes and hammered its skull with the barrel of my weapon. It took a long time to die, but it finally did. My legs and arms were slashed and bleeding freely in spots, but I’d won. I roared at the centaur, snarling and gleeful. I hoped it was one of the ones that had gotten the kids. Mad with grief, I hoped that it had kids of its own.

At this point, I figured I had to expect more of these things. Would they give up after only two tries? There had to be more of them.

Some part of my brain that still insisted on thinking was stuck on the detail that these beings didn’t seem overly technological. Could such creatures have built this ship? They had hands, after a fashion. But why risk themselves to fight me without weapons? What was the purpose? Both the centaurs had been males. Was this some kind of tribal hunting expedition? A rite of manhood, perhaps?

I decided to stop worrying about anything other than making sure I kept breathing and they kept dying. Accordingly, I checked my wounds. I couldn’t find any serious injuries, just cuts and bruises. I used my teeth to tear my tee-shirt into strips and tied bandages around the worst spots.

Panting, I waited for the next centaur. The next one would take me, I was pretty sure. I was tired now, and out of shells. As a club the Remington had done well, but I doubted it would win a third fight for me.

Getting an idea, I bent and tried to rip loose one of those foot-long horn-blades. Maybe, if I could snap it off, I could use it as a knife. The idea appealed to me, using the same blade they’d used on my kids to slash open the next creature.

END of
SWARM
EXCERPT

To purchase the entirety of the book search for
SWARM
on your Ebook Seller's website, or go to BVLarson.com

More SF Books by B. V. Larson:

UNDYING MERCENARIES SERIES:

Steel World

Dust World

Tech World

STAR FORCE SERIES:

(In chronological order)

Swarm

Extinction

Rebellion

Conquest

Army of One
(Novella published in
Planetary Assault
)

Battle Station

Empire

Annihilation

Storm Assault

The Dead Sun

Outcast

IMPERIUM SERIES:

Mech Zero
: The Dominant

Mec
h 1: The Parent

Mech 2: The Savant

Mech 3: The Empress

The Black Ship
(N
ovella published in
Five by Five
)

OTHER SF BOOKS:

Element-X

Technomancer

The Bone Triangle

Z-World

Velocity

Visit
BVLarson.com
for more information.